Joe Biden’s Heartbreaking Connection to the Sandy Hook Families

Today marks five years since a shooter took the lives of 20 six- and seven-year-olds and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown Connecticut. This week, the founders of Sandy Hook Promise—Nicole Hockley and Mark Barden, who both lost children that horrible day, and Tim Makris, a member of the Sandy Hook community—remembered the events of December 14, 2012 and called attention to the gun violence prevention and antibullying work that they have miraculously undertaken in the midst of their grief.

The organization's first New York City benefit also honored Vice President Joe Biden and Pepsico CEO Indra Nooyi. Biden, according to a Sandy Hook Promise officer, keeps in close touch with Barden and other Sandy Hook Promise parents, calling them often and especially during moments the VP knows are particularly painful, such as when news of another mass shooting hits the headlines.

“I am part of that horrible club,” an emotional, soft-spoken Biden said from the podium, referring to losing his own daughter and wife in a tractor trailer crash in 1972 (later, in 2015, he also lost his son Beau Biden to brain cancer). “But I wasn’t strong enough to do what these people do,” he added, explaining that in the aftermath of his own tragedy, he had trouble fighting for tractor-trailer legislation that was coming before Congress because it was too hard to spend every day thinking and talking about something so closely related to his own tragedy.

Gayle King hosted the gala and Sheryl Crow performed for a crowd that included Valerie Jarrett, Robert Kraft, Sophia Bush, NFL player Victor Cruz, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, John Mara, and the Ford Foundation’s Darren Walker. (Downloads of “The Dreaming Kind,” the song Crow created to honor the Sandy Hook victims, will support Sandy Hook Promise). Hockley introduced the non-profit’s latest PSA, a follow up to last year’s viral sensation Evan.

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“I know for many people, watching the video for the first time makes them uncomfortable,” Hockely said. “It should. We’re becoming too socially desensitized; too comfortable with feeling compassion in our hearts and offering thoughts and prayers, without taking action to back it up; too comfortable saying it’s too soon to talk about solutions. I would rather have someone watching this PSA be uncomfortable but then be compelled to take action, then be like me, living a lifetime of being uncomfortable without my baby boy.”

Donations to Sandy Hook Promise—which implements tested violence reduction programs in schools that have already been shown to avert several major crises—can be made at sandyhookpromise.org.

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